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Speaker A: Hi, it’s Willa. Before we get to today’s episode, I wanted to let you know that we’ve just released the next installment of the new feature we’re calling Decoder Rings Back. On Decoder Rings Back, I call up a listener and try my best to satisfactorily answer a question they’ve shared with us. This week, I spoke with our listener, Abner Gordon about a spice mix that has become ubiquitous.

Speaker B: I feel like in my lifetime there has been a meteoric rise in. In the desire for want of purchasing of everything Bagel seasoning. I see it everywhere. It’s at Walmart, it’s at Target, it’s at Costco, it’s at Whole Food. Everywhere you could possibly buy. Food has everything bagel seasoning. And I’m just curious how we got here because, like, it’s not found in nature.

Speaker A: This episode of Decoder Rings Back is out right now, but it’s only available for Decoder Ring plus members. If you’re not a plus member yet, you can become one by going to the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or, or Spotify or visiting slate.comdecoder ring becoming a member instrumentally supports the work that we do. You also get to listen to our show and all of Slate podcasts without any ads, and you’ll get to hear if we happen to ring you back for a future episode. So please sign up now. On with the show. Before we begin this this episode contains adult language and content. In the summer of 1999, Lane Brown was a budding film buff eager to see one movie in particular.

Speaker C: I must have been 16 or 17 years old. I had a subscription to Premiere magazine, and I understood that this movie was going to be a very big deal.

Speaker A: The movie was called Eyes Wide Shut. I have seen one or two things in my life, but never, never anything like this. Eyes Wide Shut was the last completed film of the director Stanley Kubrick, one of the titans of 20th century cinema.

Speaker C: And so I could really, you know, tell my parents, oh, this very important film is coming to our local theater and I have to see it as a cinephile.

Speaker A: But teenage Lane had another, less elevated interest in the movie. It was rumored to be full of sex.

Speaker C: You know, there are all these news articles about how dirty it was.

Speaker A: Basically, it starred the then married celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and was said to have an extensive orgy scene so graphic the movie had almost been rated NC17. I was excited about the filmmaking, of course, of course, of course.

Speaker C: But this is like, you know, the pre pornhub world.

Speaker A: And so we took what we could get back then and then Lean, full of h**** expectations, actually saw the movie.

Speaker C: I thought, okay, this is not at all what I was expecting. This is much stranger, way less dirty than I kind of anticipated.

Speaker A: Eyes Wide Shut is an erotic thriller that’s not especially erotic or even thrilling. It’s a slow, almost meditative movie in which Tom Cruise mostly mopes around New York City. It does have that much hyped orgy with nudity and simulated sex acts organized in the film by a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women. But it’s removed, cold, creepy, and ultimately, the film is not so much about sex as about marriage and masculinity.

Speaker C: I do remember seeing it, and my first reaction wasn’t like, I’m dismissing this, or whatever. I felt like, clearly this movie tried to tell me something that I was not ready for. And so I can’t wait to go see it again. And I think I did see it again in the theater.

Speaker A: Lane had been expecting a skin flick, but he’d actually gotten a piece of cinema.

Speaker C: It’s one he’s returned to many times as an adult, more times than I think I would care to admit.

Speaker A: I love it, but Lane’s in rare company. When it was released, Eyes Wide Shut got a lot of critical attention and made some money. But then it languished for years. It was a movie dear to Lane’s heart and not that many other people’s. And then, in the late 2000 and tens, another story about a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women came to widespread public attention. Only this was happening in the real world.

Speaker B: A wealthy businessman with ties to two US Presidents may appear in court today to face federal charges linked to alleged sex trafficking.

Speaker A: As this news story stayed squarely in the headlines, Lane began to notice it having a surprising impact on Eyes Wide Shut. People were suddenly seeing a connection between the two.

Speaker C: My feed started coughing up video after video, Reddit post after Reddit post, all espousing this sort of, like, crackpot theory about how the movie had been made by Stanley Kubrick explicitly to warn the world about real life elite sex trafficking.

Speaker D: Eyes Wide Shut is real.

Speaker C: Stanley Kubrick’s final film might not have been fiction, but instead a warning and that Stanley Kubrick was murdered when, I guess, the elite sex traffickers found out what he’d done.

Speaker A: I am not just going to dismiss the weird timing of Kubrick’s death.

Speaker E: Was Kubrick’s death part of a cover up.

Speaker A: In the three decades since Lane had first encountered this film in the half a dozen times he’d watched it, nothing like this had ever occurred to him. Had he missed something? This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. In the late 2000 and tens, as news stories about a real life conspiracy to abuse women and girls became inescapable a theory about Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut began to take off on the Internet. It involves Hollywood executives, secret societies, hidden messages and murder. And when Lane Brown, a features writer at New York Magazine, learned about it, he became curious. Could any of it be true? And if it wasn’t true, could he prove it? As Lane investigated, he learned a lot about one of his favorite films. But he also learned how far people will go in the face of terrible truths to make things make sense even if they end up making no sense themselves in the process. So today on Decoder Ring, what happens when fact is even crazier than fiction? Stanley Kubrick is the kind of director movie lovers adore. An auteur with a deep catalog of distinctive films brimming with big ideas and precise details.

Speaker C: A lot of people think he was the greatest filmmaker of all time. But even for people who wouldn’t go that far he’s probably the best, clearest example of what a movie director is supposed to be. Somebody with a huge, ambitious vision that is relentless about translating that vision into everything you see on a screen.

Speaker A: Kubrick directed 13 films including classics like 2001 A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove.

Speaker E: Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room.

Speaker A: He also directed A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket.

Speaker D: From now on, you will speak only when spoken to and the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be, sir.

Speaker A: Do you maggots understand that these movies remain essential, challenging, debated alive decades after they were released? In them, Kubra created images that are still instantly recognizable. Think of The Monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Or the twin girls in light blue dresses staring down a hotel hallway in the Shining.

Speaker F: Come and play with us.

Speaker A: Kubrick achieved these powerful, lasting images through an obsessive attention to detail.

Speaker C: He cared about everything. The lighting, the furniture, every line, every prop.

Speaker A: His perfectionism was the stuff of legend. He reportedly futzed for days with the shape and shininess of the table in Dr. Strangelove the opacity of the milk in A Clockwork Orange. He shot the 18th century epic Barry Lyndon using exclusively natural light and candlelight. He also placed extraordinarily high demands on his cast and crew.

Speaker C: He was famous for being exacting in a way that sometimes crossed the line into being unreasonable. He shot 127 takes of the scene where Jack Nicholson barges into the bathroom in the Shining. Like, chops the door open with an axe.

Speaker A: Here’s Johnny. He brought all of this intensity and rigor to his final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Speaker C: This is a very long gestating project.

Speaker A: Kubrick had his eyes on the source material for almost 30 years before he actually made the movie.

Speaker C: After he made 2001 in 1968, he’s sort of on the hunt for his next film. And so he comes across this book. Traumnovelle, or dream story.

Speaker A: Traumnovelle, by the Austrian modernist Arthur Schnitzler, was Originally published in 1926. It’s a Dark and dreamlike work about the nocturnal wanderings of a doctor in turn of the century Vienna.

Speaker C: Kubrick reads it, shows it to a few people, and then kind of obsesses over it for decades, really. And he finally, in the mid-90s, he says, okay, this is going to be my next film.

Speaker A: Before anyone had seen a frame of the movie, the public was unusually interested in it. It had been more than a decade since Kubrick’s last film, and the word got out that his new one had to do with sex. Lots of sex. And some of the people having that sex would presumably be the film’s stars.

Speaker C: The most famous married couple on the planet, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, met on the set of Days of Thunder. The racing bug bit them, and then they fell in love.

Speaker F: Get a wire or call the police.

Speaker C: What?

Speaker F: You heard me.

Speaker A: Okay, call the police. But I’m not leaving till you talk.

Speaker F: I’ve got nothing to say.

Speaker A: Well, I do. Kubrick and Kidman and Cruise and sex. That was basically all anybody knew about Eyes Wide Shut.

Speaker C: For years, Kubrick was really secretive about what this thing was. I don’t think people actually knew what it was based on. Nobody had any idea what to expect.

Speaker A: So the tabloids spun into a frenzy.

Speaker C: There was this idea that they were actually going to be having sex in this movie. There were rumors that they didn’t know how to have sex with each other because their whole marriage was a sham or something. And so they brought a sex instructor to come and, like, show them how to do it.

Speaker A: Adding to the sense of hot house intrigue around the film was that it would be made far from Hollywood. Kubrick was born in The Bronx. But he lived in England and hadn’t been back to the US since the early 1970s.

Speaker C: Kubrick was sort of a recluse and wouldn’t get on a plane, really only liked to work close to home.

Speaker A: So Tom and Nicole and the rest of the company were holed up at Pinewood Studios in London where Kubrick had built a fanatically detailed replica of New York City’s Greenwich Village. And they were stuck there for an enormously long time. When cameras rolled In November of 1996, the shoot was supposed to be done in three months. Instead, it was more than a year. 400 days to be exact.

Speaker C: This was the longest continuous film shoot, I believe, in history.

Speaker A: Cruise and Kidman and the film’s other actors had to turn down and push back other projects as the shoot stretched on and on. Taking all that time was Kubrick’s perfectionism. He worked nonstop. I’d get faxes from him 3, 4. In the morning, sometimes.

Speaker C: I’d look at it.

Speaker A: The next morning.

Speaker C: He rewrote, rewrote, rewrote, rewrote.

Speaker A: He shot dozens of takes, sometimes more. For one scene, he had Tom Cruise walk through a door 95 times. And often he only knew what he wanted after he saw it.

Speaker F: I mean, the thing about Stanley was he never explained his motives. He never explained why. He would get irritated if you asked him, so, what does this mean? Or tell me the meaning of this scene? He hated to have to explain.

Speaker A: With 95 takes of any given scene it would take a long time to find the movie within all that footage. So after 400 days of filming, Kubrick spent another 400 days or so editing. Add all of this up, and after 30 years of development and over three years of active production Stanley Kubrick finally had a complete version of the film. The cut was screened for Warner brothers in early March, 1999.

Speaker E: And then four days later, the director Stanley Kubrick, one of film’s greatest yet most controversial figures, died today. He was 70.

Speaker A: On March 7, Kubrick suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep.

Speaker E: Stanley Kubrick’s movies were usually profound, often masterpieces, and challenging, if not a little puzzling at first.

Speaker A: He left us one more movie just finished, due out this summer. But the summer was still a few months away. Despite having turned in a cut to the studio, it’s likely that Kubrick, a famous tinkerer, was not finished with it.

Speaker C: Almost everybody agrees that he probably would have fussed over the movie until it was actually released. He had a reputation for fussing with movies until the very Last possible minute. And this wasn’t quite the last possible minute.

Speaker A: No one could know exactly what he would have done. So in his absence, his collaborators tried to stick as closely as possible to the version he had turned in. But they had to make at least one big change.

Speaker C: He had promised the studio that he was going to deliver an R rated movie.

Speaker A: But when the body that determined movie ratings, the MPAA saw the film after Kubrick’s death, they decided Eyes Wide Shut should be rated NC17. NC17 would have been a kiss of death for the box office.

Speaker C: The MPA insisted. You’ve got to cut these, like five frames or whatever of thrusting or I think it was pubic hair was supposedly a contentious issue with this. And so because his editors didn’t want to actually like cut frames from the movie, they were too afraid of that. They actually had to add these like CGI digital figures in front of the dirty bits that would have gotten this movie an NC17 rating.

Speaker A: The headlines about a scene too graphic to be shown uncensored, plus the years of rumors about Tom and Nicole, all set people up to expect a certain kind of movie, including a teenaged Lane Brown.

Speaker C: And then the marketing of the movie didn’t really do it very many favors. Because if you watch the original trailer for the movie, which was actually cut by Kubrick himself, it basically looks like it’s going to be Basic Instinct or something.

Speaker A: Baby did a bad, bad thing Baby did a bad, bad thing Anticipation was high. And then In July of 1999, Eyes Wide Shut opened and revealed itself to be something else entirely. Eyes Wide Shut takes place over a couple of days in the lives of a well to do Manhattan doctor named Bill and his wife Alice. You’ve been trying to pick a fight with me and now you’re trying to make me jealous.

Speaker F: But you’re not the jealous type, are you?

Speaker C: No, I’m not.

Speaker A: The action begins when Alice makes a confession to Bill. She once considered cheating on him with a young naval officer.

Speaker F: And I thought if he wanted me, I was ready to give up everything.

Speaker C: This sort of throws him into this total spiral and he freaks out. And he kind of wanders around Manhattan looking for, but never quite having sex.

Speaker A: He gets propositioned by the daughter of one of his patients. He goes home with a sex worker, but nothing happens. And then finally comes the scene everybody had been talking about, the centerpiece of the movie.

Speaker C: He winds up at a Long island mansion where there’s an orgy being thrown by the sort of elite cult.

Speaker A: The orgy sequence lasts 18 minutes the participants wear black robes and Venetian carnival masks and are presided over by a mysterious figure in a hooded red cloak. The orgy is not exactly a free for all. There are instead eight statuesque women whose naked bodies are ritualistically unveiled and offered to the crowd of men. Bill wanders from room to room where he finds a few people having sex and many others watching them. It’s all very solemn and stagy. One of the masked naked women somehow climbing clocks Bill as an interloper and warns him to leave.

Speaker F: You are in great danger and you must get away while there’s still a chance.

Speaker A: Instead, Bill is dragged before the red cloak to be publicly humiliated and maybe worse.

Speaker C: Remove your clothes.

Speaker E: Or would you like us to do it for you? Stop.

Speaker A: The woman ran reappears and seems to sacrifice herself to save Bill’s life.

Speaker C: Take me.

Speaker A: I am ready to redeem him. The next day, she turns up dead. The friend who first told Bill about the party is disappeared, and Bill gets a strong warning to stop asking questions about the powerful people behind the masks.

Speaker E: Listen, Bill, I don’t think you realize what kind of trouble you were in last night. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names. I’m not going to tell you their names, but if I did, I don’t think you’d sleep so well.

Speaker A: When Bill goes home, he tells his wife, Alice, everything he’s done and witnessed that night. Does this mean the end of their marriage? Or will they go on as if it was all just a dream?

Speaker F: The important thing is we’re awake now. And, you know, there is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible.

Speaker A: What’s that? F***. Fade to black.

Speaker C: The world was sort of promised basically pornography. And it ends up being this, like, cold, inert, sort of like meditation on marriage with this, like, weird, abstract masked cult. And so in 1999, it was a letdown.

Speaker F: Nearly everything the public was told about this movie is wrong. The film is not erotic. It is not even about sex.

Speaker E: Instead of sending the Cruise character on a sexual odyssey, which is kind of what we expected from the advanced rumors, it sends him on a voyeuristic journey.

Speaker C: You don’t know, I mean, who he is and what he wants out of it.

Speaker B: And you don’t care whether they get back together again or not.

Speaker F: There are many of you out there who only want to see more of Tom and Nicole. Bring your binoculars.

Speaker C: Thanks to the star power and the looky loos, Eyes Wide Shut still did reasonably well, at the box office, but a lot of people just didn’t get was sort of seen as like Kubrick’s like under baked rough draft of a final movie. And yeah, it was kind of forgotten about for a couple of decades.

Speaker A: And then what happened?

Speaker C: Lo and behold, you know, it turns out he was actually kind of spot on.

Speaker A: When we come back, the world opens its eyes anew to Eyes Wide Shut. The notion of a conspiracy that meets at night to ritually abuse women and children is very, very old. It recurs so often throughout history that one scholar came up with a name for it. The nocturnal ritual fantasy. The Romans claimed that early Christians did it. Medieval Christian authorities in turn claimed that Jews, witches and heretics did it. The trope has never entirely gone away. But in the mid-2010s, the nocturnal ritual fantasy started to make a big comeback.

Speaker C: People really on the fringes were sort of obsessed with this idea of elite trafficking. There was Pizzagate.

Speaker E: People actually believe a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager John Podesta ran a child sex ring at a pizzeria in DC.

Speaker A: There was QAnon, their core belief, a global cabal including Democrats, Hollywood elites and members of what they call the deep state control much of our lives. The cabal commits atrocities including pedophilia, Satan worship and cannibalizing children.

Speaker C: And then Jeffrey Epstein happens.

Speaker F: A year long investigation. The Miami Herald says it has located 60 women who say they were molested or sexually assaulted by multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein allegedly abused dozens of minors at his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. And we are learning so much about the huge network Epstein had with powerful and important men in technology, real estate, finance, entertainment, medicine, the law, academia, American and international politics, and yes, British royalty.

Speaker A: Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, an extensive network. These are not a conspiracy theory. They are not the figment of some fringe imagination. They are real. An honest to God conspiracy at the very center of our culture. But though there is much damning documented evidence about the connections between Epstein and powerful figures throughout the American elite, it’s also true that some detailed information about these connections has been withheld from the public. Into the space between what we know for sure and what we can still only see glimpses of has flooded an enormous amount of speculation. Sometimes speculation about unusual things, including in the months immediately after Epstein’s death by an apparent but widely questioned suicide, a certain Stanley Kubrick film.

Speaker C: Really quickly, in 2019, after Epstein dies, the movie Eyes Wide Shut suddenly gets a brand new reputation. People think, wait a second, this movie was actually sort of predictive of a lot of things that really wouldn’t come into view until 20 something years later. Like the sex cult that was just this abstract, like, kind of ridiculous, like, silly thing. It may have actually been something that was real, and we are just now finding out about it.

Speaker A: The idea here was not that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut happened to be thematically relevant again. It was that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was concretely relevant. Far from being a piece of fiction, it was a warning meant to expose a real sex cult. As someone fascinated by both Eyes Wide Shut and conspiratorial thinking, Lane Brown found that he could not escape this emerging theory about the film.

Speaker C: I’m opening the Reddit app, or I’m opening, I guess X. You know, when I sit down in front of my laptop, I’ll. I’ll open YouTube.com and. And it’s kind of just always there waiting for me.

Speaker A: Across all these blogs and threads and videos, Lane found variations on the same basic story.

Speaker C: So the idea is that Kubrick supposedly had come across some information that there were rich people who were trafficking children, and he decided to spend years, decades even of his life making a movie about it. He finally made it, and then once he showed it to the studio, Warner Brothers, he was murdered to kind of prevent this information from reaching the masses. And then the sex cult somehow had the movie edited before it was released into theaters to scrub it of all of the most incriminating details.

Speaker A: So there’s quite a lot going on here. I want to break it down, and I want to start with the movie itself. What evidence is there for any of this?

Speaker C: In.

Speaker A: In Eyes Wide Shut, let’s begin with the underground elite sex cult right there on the surface. Eyes Wide Shut is about a powerful secret society that organizes elaborate sex parties and threatens violence to anyone who might expose them.

Speaker E: Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names. I’m not going to tell you their names, but if I did, I don’t think you’d sleep so well.

Speaker A: Well, but espousers of this theory believe that society is not make believe. They have scoured the film for images and details that they say suggest links to specific organizations, including the Freemasons, Bohemian Grove Satanists, and Jeffrey Epstein himself. Take your pick.

Speaker D: The mass, the rituals, the gatherings, they’re not just symbols, but a blueprint.

Speaker C: The film is steeped in Illuminati symbolism.

Speaker E: And the rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper with each viewing the ritual scene in the movie. Was filmed at Mentmore Towers. And guess who used to own it? That’s right. It was part of the Rothschild Estate until 1977.

Speaker A: There’s more. Though the young women in the ritual orgy scene in the film all appear to be adults, Close watchers point to a few other scenes that they say demonstrate that Kubrick was trying to expose a real life organization that trafficked not only in women, but but also in children. As proof, they offer up a subplot about the owner of a costume shop who seems to be happily prostituting his own teenage daughter to older men.

Speaker E: If the good doctor himself should ever want anything again, anything at all, it needn’t be a costume.

Speaker A: And they also particularly point to the final scene of the film.

Speaker C: The biggest, biggest evidence, the biggest clue, according to these people who believe this, is that in the final scene you have Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman walking their young daughter, their 8 year old daughter Helena, through this toy store, which I guess is supposed to be FAA Schwartz.

Speaker F: I hope Santa Claus gets me one of these for Christmas.

Speaker A: You do?

Speaker C: You see the daughter, Helena, kind of rounding a corner into an aisle and you see her following two male extras.

Speaker A: These two men, the theorists claim, can be seen earlier in the film and they returned here at the end to take the girl away.

Speaker C: I guess the idea is supposed to be that they are members of the cult and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have basically sacrificed their daughter to the cult. Very subtly, Kidman’s character pushes her child towards two older men and she walks off. They sold their child away. Helena will be indoctrinated, brainwashed and tortured into an MKUltra sex slave just like her mother. In exchange, she will become a member of this elite world. It’s over and done with in less than one second. Really. You blink and you miss it. But this is the thing that people hold up as the definitive proof that this theory is real.

Speaker A: Now, if all of this seems as thin to you as it does to me, the truthers will tell you there’s a reason for that. According to them, all of this is just the trace of what was originally in the movie. Just a trace of far more overt and irrefutable evidence that Stanley Kubrick was trying to sound the alarm about a real sex trafficking ring. But they say we never got to see that because the movie itself was tampered with after Kubrick’s death. Or as they claim, after he was murdered. That’s right. In this theory, Kubrick was killed because he made Eyes Wide Shut. This is where we move from not all that convincing textual analysis into full blown conspiracy theory. And the believers say the proof of this conspiracy starts with the suspicious timing of Kubrick’s death.

Speaker D: Stanley finished with his life less than a week after he finished with his movie.

Speaker A: If you’d stood back and written it, people would have laughed.

Speaker C: So the idea is that after Warner Bros. Sees the movie, I guess the elite pedophilia cult is just on speed dial here. And so I guess someone calls them up and says, you’re not going to believe what Stanley has done this time. Tells them, you know what this movie is, and then they freak out and then they have him killed.

Speaker A: Once he was out of the way, the powerful trafficking ring that murdered him set about destroying the evidence. They cut some 23 minutes from the film, radically altering the movie’s orgy scene to protect themselves.

Speaker C: Yes, supposedly he was gonna sort of break the fourth wall in this movie and tell people who the actual traffickers were. Tom Cruise, like, goes into a room and then, like, people pull off their masks and it’s like, I don’t know, Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates. Who knows? We don’t know.

Speaker A: But in re editing the movie, the conspirators failed to remove a handful of clues from the film. The ones we’ve already talked about. Visual references to specific organizations, and the final sequence where Bill and Alice perhaps send their daughter off with two strange men.

Speaker C: If you buy into this idea that Kubrick was murdered and if you believe that basically the movie was edited to sort of remove the most incriminating specific parts, I think, you know, the idea is that he had like so expertly kind of embroidered his movie with these clues that some of them survived the meddling and, you know, made it into the movie for the eagle eyed redditors who cared to find them.

Speaker A: There’s a kind of irrefutable logic at play here. Sure, the movie may contain only scant concrete evidence of a conspiracy, but that’s because of the conspiracy you could imagine wanting a little more evidence. And then in 2024, a Hollywood insider provided a version of that on the most popular podcast in the world.

Speaker E: Kubrick was such an odd one. Like, his films are so different. Yeah, he’s a weird guy, but he was also, I think, thinking three steps ahead of everybody at any kind of given moment.

Speaker C: Roger Avery, who is the director of Rules of Attraction and the co writer of Pulp Fiction, goes on the Joe Rogan Experience, and he and Joe Rogan start talking about Stanley Kubrick. And Roger Avery says, let Me tell you something about Eyes Wide Shut.

Speaker E: When they first screened the movie in England, there were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater, Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it’s my movie. You can’t cut it. You can’t cut my film. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Big argument going on. Then he dies, like, four days later.

Speaker A: Oh, Jesus.

Speaker E: So somebody went in and finished the movie, but I think when they finished the movie, they hid the film.

Speaker C: The.

Speaker E: The movie got changed into something else.

Speaker A: Roger Avery admits that he heard this story secondhand from a William Morris agent who has since died. It’s clearly scuttlebutt, but it was the most enticing, faux plausible scuttlebutt yet.

Speaker C: And that basically pours gasoline on the fire of this whole thing.

Speaker A: And it was finally at this point that Lane was like, okay, this has gotten out of hand.

Speaker C: To be clear, of course, I believe that Kubrick, you know, was overloading his movie with symbolism. God bless him, we love it. That’s why he’s Stanley Kubrick. I don’t think he was actually warning the world about any real sex cults.

Speaker A: And so he thought, maybe I need to write something about this.

Speaker C: Could I investigate this and talk to people who worked with Kubrick on the movie and see if I, you know, maybe can I debunk this theory? Could I talk to enough people who would actually know the truth?

Speaker A: The truth is out there after the break. So before we dive into all the ways that Lane took on this conspiracy, I want to pause for a second and acknowledge that this kind of wild theory is not that unusual. It’s not even that unusual about a Stanley Kubrick movie.

Speaker C: Because he was so famously obsessed with such tiny details. A lot of people kind of wonder if basically every detail in his movie maybe has some hidden meaning.

Speaker A: The best example of this is Kubrick’s film the Shining, liberally adapted from a novel by Stephen King.

Speaker E: My grandmother and I could hold conversations entirely without ever opening our mouths. She called it Shining.

Speaker A: When it was first released in 1980, the Shining was considered something of a failure. King, for one, famously hated it. But its reputation has grown over time, and it’s now an uncontested classic. It is also the source of so many elaborate fan theories that there is a feature length documentary called Room 2237 devoted to the movie’s most fervent and feverish analyzers.

Speaker D: Inside the Shining are hundreds of subliminal images, objects and colors and music and anything else. There’s many levels to this film. This is like three dimensional chest trying to tell us several stories that appear to be separate, but actually are not.

Speaker A: Viewers have pored over every detail in the the film and seen in them concrete evidence that Stanley Kubrick wasn’t making a piece of art open to interpretation, but instead sending a specific message about the movie’s meaning to anyone who could recognize the clues. From a poster on the wall to the pattern of the carpet, to the hotel room number.

Speaker D: If you Multiply the numbers 2, 3 and 7, you get 42. And for a German historian, if you put the number 42 and a German typewriter together, you get the Holocaust.

Speaker A: Probably the most famous theory about the Shining is also the most outlandish.

Speaker C: There’s this theory that Kubrick faked the moon landing, like helped NASA fake the moon landing using the techniques that he developed for 2001. And then the Shining was somehow his apology for this. And the evidence for that, I guess, is that he put Danny Torrance in a Apollo 11 sweater.

Speaker D: So Danny stands up, he’s got the Apollo 11 sweater on. He begins walking down the hallway towards room 237. And the room, room 237 in the film is. Represents the moon landing stage where he worked.

Speaker A: These days, so many contemporary fictions, movies, and TV shows ask their viewers to watch like this, to comb them for clues, searching for the answer that will solve some central mystery. Everything is like a treasure map, pointing viewers in the direction of a solution. But when you treat every piece of art, to say nothing of the real world, like a treasure map, you can end up in some very weird and reductive places.

Speaker C: The reason we are still watching these movies, you know, Kubrick’s movies, like 50 years later, is because they’re filled with ideas. Not all of them are pointing in the same direction, but you can revisit these things and pick and choose which ones you want to pay attention to on that particular viewing. And.

Speaker A: But now Lane was seeing post after post claiming that Eyes Wide Shut wasn’t a movie about a lot of things. It was just a warning about a real sex trafficking cabal.

Speaker C: But. But Eyes Wide Shut was not made with this. You know, paint my numbers. Like, easy to unlock thinking in mind. I don’t think, like, save it for True Detective season four or whatever.

Speaker A: If people had turned Eyes Wide Shut into a rabbit hole, he was going to close that rabbit hole up. Eyes Wide Shut was not a treasure map. It was a movie, a great movie, a capacious movie. And he would prove it right away. He Saw some obvious problems with the idea that Stanley Kubrick had made the movie to tell the world about real life sex trafficking, maybe even specifically Jeffrey Epstein. First of all, Kubrick initially considered making this movie in the late 1960s, when Jeffrey Epstein would have only been a teenager. Its plot is also very faithful, right down to the orgy scene, to an Austrian novel from the 1920s when Epstein was not alive. And even if the movie was trying to expose somebody else, that is still a very long time to sit on such serious secrets.

Speaker C: If Kubrick had actually come into possession of information about a real life sex trafficking cult, I don’t understand why he would, you know, spent $60 million making this movie about it, spent 400 days shooting it, another 400 days editing it. It’s like this is time going by. If there’s real, you know, elite sex trafficking going on, you’d probably want to put an end to it.

Speaker A: He could have gone to the police.

Speaker C: He could have told a journalist or taken an ad out in a newspaper, anything, lots of different ways to tell the world about something bad that’s going on.

Speaker A: Blaine was not content to poke holes in this conspiracy theory from the comfort of his couch. He set out to talk to everyone he could who. Who worked on Eyes Wide Shut to find out what had really happened.

Speaker C: And pretty much everybody, as soon as they picked up the phone, just sort of launched into a whole explanation for why these theories were completely stupid.

Speaker A: He called up the editor of Eyes Wide Shut. He spoke with Kubrick’s longtime assistant and archivist, and he also spoke with Kubrick’s producer, slash brother in law.

Speaker C: I talked to a lot of people, and it did not seem like they had coordinated their stories and were sort of in on some secret conspiracy. They all had, you know, slightly different memories of kind of making this movie. But the one thing they all agreed on was that Kubrick was not, you know, warning the world explicitly about any real life sex cult.

Speaker A: Still, Lane was not satisfied. He wanted to address each element of this ornate conspiracy theory one at a time. So first, did Kubrick know the secrets of some real life secret society? Had he witnessed one of their orgies and been so disturbed that he spent 3:30 years trying to bring the truth to light?

Speaker C: Frederick Raphael, the movie’s co writer, who I believe is 93 years old, he told me, I don’t think Stanley gave a flying about warning the world about anything.

Speaker A: Raphael told Lane, in fact, that it was a struggle for Kubrick to even imagine the elite cabal that was so crucial to his film.

Speaker C: He had no idea what would motivate such a organization.

Speaker A: Lane also learned that Kubrick didn’t seem to know much about orgies either. According to an expert in group sex he tracked down who advised Kubrick on the film.

Speaker C: The two of them spent, like, hundreds of hours on the phone because Kubrick apparently himself had never attended an actual orgy, and this guy had been to plenty.

Speaker A: Okay, so maybe Kubrick wasn’t aware of the workings of any particular sex trafficking ring. But what about the final scene where Bill and Alice allegedly sacrificed their daughter Helena to the cult? The smoking gun that supposedly proves Kubrick was trying to encourage code the movie with a message about trafficking children?

Speaker F: Yeah, it’s really pretty.

Speaker A: Well, that would be news to the child actor who played the daughter. Lane spoke with her too.

Speaker C: She was kind of shocked to find out these theories were even going around. She had no idea. And so she read, like, one of the 500,000 word blog posts that I’d sent her, and she was like, this is crazy.

Speaker A: Remember, the key to many online theories about Eyes Wide Shut is that Helena appears to go off with two older men in a toy store. The actress who played her told Lane that this was pure happenstance.

Speaker C: There was never any suggestion on the set of the movie that this is what was happening. Stanley never told me to go stand near these, like, two creepy bald men in a way that would suggest that I’m being kidnapped by them.

Speaker A: And then there’s the most incendiary claim that Kubrick was murdered so that 23 minutes of the film could be deleted before its release.

Speaker C: Everybody told me there was no extra footage that was cut. He never told anybody the address of, like, real life traffickers or anything. Everybody said this was nonsense.

Speaker A: In fact, the reality was the opposite. They were reluctant to cut anything out after Kubrick’s death. That was the whole reason they covered up some of the sex acts with CGI figures so that they could appease the censors without having to cut a single frame from the orgy. But what about the story shared by Roger Avery on the Joe Rogan Experience, that Kubrick had gotten into a screaming match with studio executives after showing them the film?

Speaker E: There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater, Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it’s my movie. You can’t cut it. You can’t f****** cut my film. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Big argument going on. Then he dies, like, four days later.

Speaker C: So this. I spent weeks nailing all of this down. There was no possibility that that story was true.

Speaker A: Lane found out that there were only three screenings total of the movie before Kubrick died. The first two took place on the same day in New York. One for Tom and Nicole and one for the studio executives.

Speaker C: But Kubrick was not there. He was at home in England, kind of waiting by the phone.

Speaker A: Kubrick, remember, was afraid of flying and hadn’t been back to the US since the early 1970s. So that ruled out the possibility of him getting into an argument with anyone at either of the first two screenings. That left the third and final screening. Nigel Gault, the film’s editor, was also the projectionist at all three screenings. He told Lane that he did fly back to England with a print of the film to show it in Stanley Kubrick’s private screening room at his house. But there were no Warner Brothers executives in the room, and Kubrick wasn’t there either. The only person watching was Tom Cruise’s publicist.

Speaker C: So I called her, and she told me what had happened. She said that he was sick, not feeling well, and so he was up in his bedroom. And so she and Kubrick had a conversation by phone. And so she told him over the phone, I was mesmerized by the movie. I loved it. But there was no argument, no fighting. He never yelled, you can’t cut my movie. None of that.

Speaker A: I mean, to your point, it sounds like Stanley Kubrick was not physically present for any of the three screenings of his film, right?

Speaker C: Was not there to actually have a verbal altercation with anybody.

Speaker A: The very next day after the final screening that Kubrick was too ill to attend, he died. His co writer, Frederick Raphael, put it to Lane very plainly. He was 70 years old and looked about 120. He was very stressed, and producing that movie was enough to kill him. Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it. Lane Brown’s article about Eyes Wide Shut was published by New York Magazine in December of 2025. He’d written it, hoping, even expecting, to debunk the conspiracy theories swirling around one of his favorite movies to make them go away. Needless to say, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Speaker C: For, like, one afternoon, it was on Reddit, and I saw a couple of tweets about it. And then now we’re just right back to this, you know, conspiracy theorizing. Like, my. My story never even happened. They want to believe, and so they keep on believing.

Speaker A: Alfred Hitchcock famously said that on a feature film, the director is God. He’s all knowing, he’s all seeing, he’s all powerful. And he’s making a world in his image. One of the things that strikes me about all the Stanley Kubrick conspiracists is that they are not so very far from enthusiasts, scholars and fans of Stanley Kubrick or even of any other great artist. They all attribute to these artists godlike moviemaking powers and intentionality. They all respond to their work personally with deep thought and interpretation. It’s just that the cinephiles appreciate that good work can and does contain ambiguous, ambivalent, inarticulable ideas. And the conspiracist insists that no, its value is tied to some one specific meaning, a meaning that forecloses all others. But in trying to prove that a work is about one thing, even something extraordinary, they are also insisting it doesn’t mean anything else. They are forcing it, in a sense, to mean less than it really does.

Speaker C: A lot of this is kind of unnecessary. It’s like you can really sort of give Kubrick credit for basically anticipating something that, you know, the rest of us didn’t know existed until years later. You don’t really need to fall down the conspiracy hole. It is kind of amazing that he told this story almost 27 years ago at this point, and it actually sort of ended up being more like our real world than we ever could have known at the time.

Speaker A: I personally find it heartening. There are artists whose work is so layered and complex, it is able to resonate in new ways throughout time. But I can also see that this might be cold comfort to some when compared to the promise, the hope that at least somebody was shouting about Jeffrey Epstein from the rooftops, or at least on 35 millimeter. Believing even something as disturbing as the conspiracy about Eyes Wide Shut is more comforting than the reality, which is that so many people knew and said nothing. But in the conspiracy, in its alternate reality, at least someone, a powerful man no less, tried to warn us. It’s all a fiction, but you can understand why it might be preferable to the facts. This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. Lane Brown’s piece for New York Magazine about all of this. The Eyes Wide Shut conspiracy is wonderful, and we’ll link to it on our show page. This episode was written and produced by Max Friedman. It was edited by me. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepard and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob, is senior technical director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoder ringslate.com or call us at 347-460-728, 1. We love hearing from you and we will see you in two weeks.